RUM Dashboard

A picture speaks louder than a thousand words! Messages conveyed using a visual medium are always more impactful and reaches the audience more quickly. This is the philosophy that drives eG's Real User Monitor Dashboard. With the help of a bevy of visual tools - eg., intuitive icons, color-coded values, miniature graphs, geo maps, etc. - this real-time dashboard helps administrators understand, from just a glance, the following:

• How is the traffic to the managed web sites/web applications in your environment? Is the traffic to any web site/web application suspiciously high or low?

• From which devices is this traffic coming from - desktops? Mobile phones? Or tablets?

• Is the user experience with any managed web service poor presently? If so, what is causing service quality to degrade - delay in page loading? Or JavaScript errors?

• How many distinct users are currently connected to each web site / web application being monitored? - this is a good indicator of the number of users who are truly contributing to the traffic on the web site.

This way, the dashboard facilitates the rapid identification of web sites/web applications in your environment that do not enjoy user confidence and the probable reasons for this unfavorable user perception.

Moreover, the exact pages that are slow, the reason for the slowness of those pages, and the JavaScript errors that are wrecking user experience, can all be identified with a quick click from this dashboard. For instance, you can click on the Page Load Time measure representation in the dashboard. The RUM Transaction Details popup window will then appear. From the popup window, you can know which page views are experiencing slowness and why - is it because of the front end? network? or backend?

This way, the Real User Monitor Dashboard takes you from the problem symptoms to the problem source in no time!

Also, drilling down from the name of the managed web site/web application in the dashboard will lead you to the dashboard revealing the user experience per geography, where you will find various perspectives to user experience represented visually.

Without requiring you to pour over tens of metrics, the Geo Performance map quickly tells you where your users are. The Unique Sessions/IPs section reveals how many unique users are currently viewing the web site/web application in your environment. Also, by color-coding the countries on the basis of the experience of the users in those countries, the map intelligently differentiates between the “happy” regions and the “unhappy” ones.

Note:

At any given point in time, you can choose to view only the request indicators - i.e., the markers - or the response time indicators - i.e., the countries colored using conventional color-codes - in the map. For instance, to hide the markers, uncheck the Requests flag below the map. To hide the colored countries, uncheck the Response time flag below the map.

To know why users from such countries are ‘unhappy’ with the web site / web application, click on the problem country in the map. A GEO PERFORMANCE MAP pop-up box will appear revealing what the users from that country experience when interacting with the target web site/web application. The page views from the country, the average page load time, and the error percentage are displayed in the box. From this, you can easily infer what is ailing the experience of users from that country - slow page loading? Or JavaScript errors? 

The question now is which requests to the web site/web application are slow? To zoom into the slow requests, click on the Avg page load time value in the GEO PERFORMANCE MAP pop-up box. The RUM TRANSACTION DETAILS window then appears listing the slow requests from that country, starting with the slowest. From RUM TRANSACTION DETAILS window, you can also infer exactly where the request slowed down.

If users from a country are experiencing slowness, it is only natural that you want to figure out whether the problem is widespread or is confined to a specific region within that country. This can be easily determined by zooming into a problem country in the map!  For this, just select the country you want to focus on from the Country drop-down list in the Geo Performance map. The GEO PERFORMANCE MAP pop-up box will then appear revealing the exact regions (in that country) from which requests are received and the overall experience of the users from each region.

Likewise, you can quickly drill-down from a region to view the cities in that region and the quality of their experience with the web site / web application. For this city-level view, select a Country and then a Region from the GEO PERFORMANCE MAP. Using the GEO PERFORMANCE MAP that appears, you can precisely pinpoint the city that is experiencing slowness.

If a web site / web application receives hundreds of requests from tens of countries, regions, and cities, the Geo Performance map may appear cluttered, making it difficult for you to isolate the problem points. This is where the Top-5 Slow <Countries/Regions/Cities> list helps. Depending upon the geography you zoom into in your Geo Performance Map - whether it is a Country or a Region - this list will display the top-5 countries / regions / cities (as the case may be) in terms of responsiveness. For example, if you choose a particular Country from your Geo Performance Map to zoom into, then the top-5 list will display the top-5 ‘least responsive’ regions within that country. This enables accurate identification of those countries, regions, and cities, whose experience with the web site / web application is unsatisfactory.

But the question now is, how badly is the experience of users from a few geographies affecting the overall user experience with the web site/web application? Nothing reveals that better than the Apdex Score of the web site/web application!

The User Experience section reports the current Apdex Score of the monitored web site/web application. If the score is very low, you can figure out why by viewing the heat map right below and the legend alongside - this reveals the percentage of satisfied, tolerating, and frustrated page views.

If the tolerating and frustrated page views are more than the satisfied page views, you will want to know where exactly user experience is suffering. The Top 5 Slow Page Groups section tells you where! By listing the slowest page groups in your web site/web application, this section points you the probable problem areas - i.e., it points you to the groups that probably contain the problem pages. This way, this section takes you a step closer to isolating the real reason for a high number of tolerating and frustrated page views.

Scrolling down the dashboard allows you to shift from analyzing current user experience to scrutinizing historical user experience. The first graph cross-correlates page views with the page load time registered during the last hour. From this graph, you can figure out how many of your users are being impacted by slow pages. Where users are revenue, this graph will help you understand how many users are dissatisfied with your web service, and how that dissatisfaction will impact your bottom line!

The second graph cross-correlates slow page views with error page views during the last hour. With the help of this graph, you can determine whether/not slow page views are increasing in tandem with error page views - this could mean that JavaScript errors are probably the reason why page views are slowing down. This takes you closer to nailing the real reason for the slowness.

Scrolling down the dashboard further reveals two stacked area charts. The Trend of Page Load Time chart traces the high and low trends in page load time during the last hour. From this graph, you can instantly determine what has contributed the most to the increase in page load time during the last hour - the network? the backend? Or the front end? Once the problem tier is identified, you can focus your time and resources on isolating the exact problem with that tier and eliminating it, so that user experience improves rapidly. The Trend of User Experience graph that appears next, reveals when during the last hour the tolerating, satisfied, and frustrated page views peaked and when they were the lowest. From this graph, you can easily figure how the page viewing experience of users was at any given point in time during the last hour.

To know which browsers and devices are popular with your web site/web application users, use the distribution pie charts that will appear when you scroll down the dashboard further.